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After searching for Halloween decorations this year and finding gory and cheap-looking or arts and crafty home-made for a million dollars, I decided to come up with some ideas of my own. I wanted the outside of my home to be cute and classy and have a continuous flow of similarly styled items instead of a few random things placed here and there. I decided to go with a haunted house theme. I had a few areas to decorate so I started with:

The Doorway

I figured this was a good place to start and it could set the tone for the rest of the decorating. I wanted something crafty and home made. I also wanted it to fill up the space at the front doorway. I got a large grapevine wreath (on sale for $3.69 at the local craft/fabric store,) and spray painted it with orange spray paint, which I got a can of at WalMart for $1.00. We live right on a river and there is a trail next to it that my kids and I walked along searching for dead branches about the height of our door. We spray painted those orange as well. Then I cut out a couple of bats from some black cardstock. I gave them to my 6-year old and my 3-year old and they traced them onto other black cardstock and cut them out until we had about a dozen. Then I hot-glued the bats randomly onto the wreath and throughout the branches. I got some of the leftover spider web from last year and stretched that in the bottom section of the center of the wreath and put a little plastic spider in it. Then I hung the wreath on the door and placed the two branches in some potted plants that I already had on either side of the door and voila! we had an adorably decorated front door without spending a lot of money and avoiding the tacky decorations that seem to saturate the stores for this holiday. It looked like a flock of bats were flapping around our entry.

The windows

I wanted something in the windows that would be large enough to see from the street and that went along with the haunted house theme. I was still in search of something more home-made looking than the paper cut-outs or vinyl stickers you see adorning windows this spooky time of year. I decided to cover the two front windows in large spider web designs made from black electrical tape. I did this by making a circle out of electrical tape in the center of the window and then making a few strips from the circle to the edge of the window. Then I made my web by stringing the tape from one strip to the next until they looked like giant black spider webs. Super cheap, and I can't believe how cute it turned out! I decided to make a large spider for each window as well. I did this by attaching two Styrofoam balls together, one 5 inch and one 2inch, with a bamboo skewer and then painting this "body" of the spider black with a can of walmart spray paint. I bought some black pipe cleaner (86 cents) and inserted the wire into the styrofoam balls for legs and then twisted one together for a hook in the backside of the spider. We used straight pins-the ones with the little balls on the end-to make red eyes for the spiders. Then we attached the spiders to the porch roof (you could attach them to the top of the window or any way you can to make it work) by the black yarn. They hung right over the electrical tape spider webs. It looked like they were resting there in their webs!

The Porch

Each of the kids had their own pumpkin, of course, and I wanted to display them as part of our decoration. I arranged them all in kind of a pile in the flower bed just in front of the porch. I bought a life-like black cat from wal-mart ($10) and stood him right on top of one of the pumpkins. Just above his tail is a wooden sign made from two old boards with the words "Haunted House" stenciled on the front. The sign is yellow and has two holes drilled in the top and a ribbon threaded through for hanging it. I hung the sign on a shepherd's hook, the kind you hang flower pots or something of that nature on. My neighbor paints boards with sayings and makes cute decorations out of them. I bought the sign from her, but you could easily and affordably make your own. I also have a post stuck in the ground a little further down that is like a miniature street sign pointing the direction to different Halloween places.

I am very happy with how it turned out. It definitely has a consistent flow and I have gotten tons of compliments on how cute my house looks. It was also lots of fun making the decorations and putting them all up. My kids loved it! It was very simple and extremely affordable and it ended up looking better than anything I could have purchased at the store. Bring on the trick-or-treaters!